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Diaries and government communication are often
considered the most reliable of documents. They are the staple of
traditional historical research. EH Carr famously described this
fetishism of the documents in ‘What is History?’: ‘The documents
were the Ark of the Covenant in the temple of facts. The reverent
historian approached them with bowed head and spoke of them in awed
tones. If you find it in the documents, it is so.’
The main value of these sources is that the people
producing them know they can say or write what they like honestly,
without concern for the views of others. Diarists for example need not concern
themselves with what their relatives think. Politicians need not be
concerned with what the voters might think. This is very liberating
and often provides more reliable evidence about the past.
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Occasionally wars or revolutions result in regime change that means
previously secret information is suddenly made available.
The best
example of this was the end of the Cold War in 1991 where communist
regimes in Russia and Eastern Europe were overthrown. Almost
overnight secret government documents were released covering decades
of history behind the Iron Curtain. The significance of this was
neatly summed-up by the title of the American Cold War historian
John Lewis Gaddis’s 1997 book ‘We Now Know’. (see below) |
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Writing down thoughts
about a day’s events inevitably involves a process of narrative
selection and construction that is simply one person’s version of
events. Although, some diaries (especially by politicians) are written with
the intention of publication in mind, even genuinely private
diaries can present problems. History students are keen to make the
legitimate point that diarists have no motivation to lie to
themselves. But conscious lying is not the problem. Diarists are
also prone to what social psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’
or what is commonly known as ‘sour grapes’. A classical example of
this idea (and the origin of the expression ‘sour grapes’) is the
Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Grapes. In the story, a fox sees some
high-hanging grapes and wishes to eat them. When the fox is unable
to think of a way to reach them, he surmises that the grapes are
probably not worth eating because they are sour. Diaries are full of
this post-hoc reasoning as diarists seek to explain their day in a
meaningful way. It is not deliberate duplicity, but an inevitable
consequence of human behaviour: we kid ourselves!
A second problem is the obvious lack of objectivity. In his
analysis of the private papers of Gustav Stresemann the German
statesman of the 1920s,EH Carr pointed out that what we have is
always Stresemann’s version of events –
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‘They depict Stresemann
as having the lion's share of the conversations and reveal
his arguments as invariably well put and cogent, while those
of his partner are for the most part scanty, confused and
unconvincing. This is a familiar characteristic of all
records of diplomatic conversations. The documents do not
tell us what happened, but only what Stresemann thought had
happened, or what he wanted others to think, or perhaps what
he wanted himself to think, had happened.’ |
A final weakness concerns the secret documents themselves. Just
because documents have finally come down to us ‘declassified’, this
doesn’t guarantee that they are complete and unexpurgated. Those
that remain might come to us by chance or indeed as the result of
deliberate selection. Wars, fires and regime changes can also lead
to the destruction of documents in which the remaining sample can
not provide a genuinely representative overview. This has been the
case with documentary evidence of the Nazi regime in Germany for
example which exists for very few German regions. (see below) |
